


Like Us, They Are Flawed

by trashleyz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Next-Gen, Other, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 01:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29742948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashleyz/pseuds/trashleyz
Summary: They aren’t perfect, not the way that people expect them to be.
Kudos: 4





	Like Us, They Are Flawed

**Author's Note:**

> Some sentences are references to song lyrics and if you recognize them, I want to be your friend. 
> 
> That said tho, I am not a writer. It’s something I’ve always wanted to be good at but really struggle with. This would just not leave my brain until I wrote it down, so be gentle with criticisms.

Lucy is a good girl. She is neat and tidy and she always listens to what she’s told. Her shoes are polished and her robes are unruffled. Her hair is brushed and tied back, her teeth are clean, and her smile is bright. She loves her family deeply and always remembers to tell them so. She does not cause a fuss and does not talk back, not that there’s usually an opportunity to. 

Everyday, she’s in bed by nine o’clock. And everyday, she’s a well behaved eleven year old. But some days... some days in the depths of her mind, a place she’d never admit to anyone actually exists, she thinks she’d like to raise a little hell. She’d go find trouble, if there was some to get in. She’d ask a friend to play, if she had one to let in. 

She does not tell her parents, as she listens to the stories her aunts and uncles tell about the war and their adventure, that one day she’d like to go on adventures too, that she ignores every time she’s told of how dangerous it was, that she knows her parents would never approve of the fantastical adventures her mind takes her on. Sometimes she will go out the back garden to find the toad that sits in the same spot every single day and tell him all about the things she thinks and that maybe one day she’ll bring him with as well. 

Is it wrong to wish for something more? She thinks she’s kept on a pretty tight leash for a really good girl.

* * *

Hugo is never still. His mind is always racing while his fingers tap patterns on his knees and his foot shakes from side to side in his shoe. His mind is never quiet, never rests, but that’s alright because he’s never known anything different. 

Entranced as they are at his causal brilliance, the ease in which he can conjure up answers, they never think to question why he can not make eye contact, why he seems to lose his wand every time he turns around, why he sometimes pauses in the middle of a sentence to change the subject, why he starts crying when he’s forced into jeans to visit his grandparents, why he would rather starve than eat anything soft and mushy, why his brain will get stuck on a word or a phrase or a lyric and will repeat it for hours, days, on end. They never think to question these things and so neither does he. He is content to live his life the way he is with a brain the sometimes works faster than his mouth and causes him to forget his words. 

He wonders if one day his mind will move  _too_ fast and he’ll end up getting left behind.

* * *

Lily is enthralling. She’s the baby, the only girl, and she’s always known how to get what she wants. It was a surprise to everyone except her when she was sorted into Slytherin. 

She shakes off the vestiges of childhood in a famous named family, with slow lipsticked smile. A side glance and a honeyed voice are all it takes for them to do as she asks. For them to turn around and thank  her for the opportunity. She takes over Hogwarts before anyone even realizes how truly capable she is. 

( _They should be glad she grew up in home where she was loved and taught moralsbecause unbeknownst to anyone, except maybe the sorting hat, her mind is unnervingly similar to that of a poor orphan boy with lifeless eyes and lingering smirk who was sorted into Slytherin nearly a century ago._ )

She has places to go and she doesn’t care who she has to step over to get there.

* * *

Louis is lost. His mind is like maze, easy to get lost in. Sometimes he hears things that other people don’t seem to, and sometimes he sees things that no one else reacts to. He’s never told anybody because they would only say he’s crazy. And Louis knows he isn’t. But sometimes he gets stuck in his head and it will take him hours to find his way out.

Sometimes he hears voices. They’re not usually nice voices. One time the voice convinced him to set the curtains on fire and he cried for two hours afterwards. Sometimes he closes his eye amidst the dancing lights and imagines that he is somewhere warm and quiet.

Louis is not crazy, but he worries that one day he’ll get stuck in his head and never be able to find his way out.

* * *

Al is not okay. He spends his days teetering on the ledge of something he can’t take back. He spends his nights wondering if there’s a point.

With bottle green eyes, fake smiles, and a laugh that’s just a smidge too loud, he pretends he’s never been better. No one notices because why would they? He’s too young to be this sad; he’s never lived through a war, never lost anyone he loved, never had to worrying about being hunted.

So he’ll sneak another shot of firewhiskey, and he’ll stumble his way through another party and he’ll wonder if anyone would even miss him. He’s never seen his father cry. Would he cry at his sons funeral?

_ (Of course he would, harder than he’s ever cried over anything because he’s never loved anything the way he loves his children.) _

Would his mother rage the way she did when his father spent three days at St Mungos?

_ (Of course she would. She would level houses with the fury and guilt she’d feel towards herself for not noticing.) _

He’s convinced himself that they’re all just pretending, so who cares if he writes the ending.

_ (A lot of people would if they bothered to pay attention.) _

* * *

Roxanne is angry. Angry at the world, angry at herself, angry at her friends, at the boy who won’t even look in her direction, at the girl in her dorm who is so pretty it hurts, angry at her parents for daring to bring her into a world that has yet to get itself together. 

How can a world which can create such beautiful things be so ugly? The treatment of magical creatures, the resentment towards anyone who is not pureblooded, the treatment of prisoners in Azkaban, the ostracization of werewolves, of anyone seen as lesser. But why should they get to decided what make someone lesser? Why should they be able to keep people so far down they’ll never be able to get back up? 

She is angry and she is going to make sure the world sees her anger, her fury, until they can no longer ignore her and the injustices that she  will fix because no one else bothered to. 

She has dreams so big she gets uncomfortable telling small-minded people.

* * *

Rose is ordinary. So, so painfully ordinary, standing in the shadows of her extraordinary family members. The only days where she’s not stressed are the days she works herself to death, until she too tired to feel anything at all. 

She is the only Weasley that knots a yellow and black scarf around her neck every winter. Her teeth ache from her perpetually clenched jaw, her fingers cold where they’re wrapped around a book, and shoulders drawn close to her ears from tension. 

She tries to pretend that it doesn’t hurt when all the friends she pushed away stopped trying. She doesn’t need them anyway, they’ll just keep comparing her to her family, right?

She is an unexceptional girl with everything to prove 

( _But only to herself because they’ve always loved her anyway. They can only hope she doesn’t lose herself on the way.)_

* * *

Dominique is responsible. She is responsible but she’s never considered that maybe she doesn’t need to be. She’s never realized that other people, her family, her cousins, her friends, are not her responsibility. That their failures and troubles are not her fault.

She is responsible, but she is also drowning. She has a dream that she’s screaming underwater while her friends are waving from the shore. She feels so much all the time and she wishes she didn’t. It gets to be too much sometimes and she doesn’t know how to fix it.

So when her friend handed her a potion at a party, how was she supposed to know she wouldn’t be able to stop? That she would get addicted to numbness that came with the high? How was she supposed to know?

She never meant for it to happen, but its alright because now she can hardly feel anything at all.

* * *

Fred is anxious. He hides it behind the pranks and jokes that people expect from him. How could they not, with a name like his? No one can tell that his stomach is tied up in knots, no one can tell that his heart is racing and his palms are sweaty, no one can see the way breath quickens, the way he hides his trembling hands in his pockets. 

Sometimes it creeps on him. One moment he laughing and happy with his friends and in the next moment his breath stutters and his chest feels tight and he can’t breathe and he has to run somewhere quiet and safe while he sits on the floor with his arms wrapped the legs he pull up to his chest and he rests his forehead on his knees and tries to convince himself that he’s not dying. It doesn’t always work. 

Sometimes he’s not sure if he will ever stop feeling like the world is ending. Sometimes he not sure he wants to because one day it might actually be.

* * *

James is fearless. He has the face of his famous father and all the tenacity of a boy who’s never been told he can’t. He grew up with magic in his bones, in the light of his eyes, and in the air he breathed. And yet there was so much in this world that he didn’t know. But he would know. With a dimpled smile and a red and gold scarf wrapped around his neck, he buried himself in discovering.

They say the sky is the limit, but then one day he learned there is no sky, there is only as far as you’re willing to go, and so he kept going. And going and going, until the sun scorched his robes and he could smell the smoke rising, until he could no longer see the ground beneath the clouds, but that was okay because he never planned on turning back anyway. The reckless abandon of youth shredding any caution he could have learned from the listening to the stories of his brother’s namesake.

Perhaps it is because he never heard the story of Icarus and so he didn’t understood that the higher he climbed, the farther he had to fall, if he didn’t get burned up first.

* * *

Molly is unyielding. She is intense and immovable. She can argue, reason, and debate her way out of anything. She will get what she wants, even if it takes days of non stop discussions about it. The word no is simply not in her vocabulary. 

It is lucky then that what she wants more than anything is not world domination but the girl who sits in the back corner of every class, the girl who reads in the library with the nail of her thumb between her teeth, the girl who smells like cherries and sugar, who does not talk in class but still gets O’s on her assignments. Molly knows these things because she pays attention. The girl does not realize how closely Molly watches her but on Molly’s really lucky days, the girl will glance up, catch her staring, and smile sweetly. 

This is Molly’s world, everyone else is simply living in it. 

* * *

Victoire is fragile. She wasn’t always, but now it feels like if she doesn’t keep her arms wrapped around her body then she might just fall apart. She takes too hot showers and tries her best to scrub away the remnants of the night a boy decided it was _his_ right to decide. She’s still hurting. She is sure something wonderful in her died that night. Does he know that she was not something to play with?

It’s her body and she hates him. It’s her body and she hates that he made her feel trapped in it. The boy, the Hufflepuff boy. Everybody loves him. He is funny and popular and kind. They don’t know enough about him. It’s okay until it’s not and she’s back there. Does he know that she can’t smell mint anymore without throwing up? That she can’t see the color yellow in the corner of her eye without a twinge of fear running up her spine? That she can’t sleep at night without lying to herself? Do they know that she regrets him? Do they know she shouldn’t have to?

Sometimes she sits on the roof crying and hopes with each gust of wind that it will carry her away.


End file.
